Summary 5/2013
Miroslav Petříček’s series “Sceptics and Subverts” continues here with the next instalment entitled “Moralists who do not Sermonize” and is accompanied by a selection from the works of Jean La Bruyère entitled “Characters – on Society and Conversation”. The section “Here Are Czechs” is dedicated to Czech theatre and in it Jan Kerbr writes on the theatre Cabaret Calembour (“Schoolfellows Entertaining Themselves”), Michal Zahálka contributes “contemplations from journeys in search of regional theatre” (“Where the Lions Are”), Martin Švejda reviews the latest première at the Divadlo v Dlouhé (“Miss Jairus: Returns and Repetitions of Hana Burešová”) and in her essay “How to Cope with Havel” Pavlína Pacáková deals with The Beggar’s Opera by the director Daniel Špinar at the Klicperovo divadlo in Hradec Králové and The Garden Party staged by Dušan D. Pařízek at the National Theatre. In the next section Vladimír Mikulka maps out the two most recent seasons of the Brno Buranteatr (“A Theatre which Dares to be Ordinary”) and in the following one Martina Ulmanová writes about Russian dramaturgy in Slovakia (“The White Birch Trees Syndrome”). The entire “World in Vienna” section is devoted to this year’s Wiener Festwochen. Here Soňa Šimková considers the productions The Idea of a Face Looking at the Son of God (“Romeo Castellucci and Epiphany”), The Whole of Heaven above the Ground: Wendy’s Syndrome (“Liddell Performs Peter Pan”) and Tartuffe (“Bondy’s Austrian Hypocrite”), Michaela Mojžišová looks at Written on Skin (“Auto-Narration by Benjamin, Crimp & Nagano“) and Il Trovatore (“Comics by the Gentlemen Wellber and Stölzl”), Marek Lollok reports on the production Playing Cards 1: Spades (“Lepage and the Fighters in the Desert”) and Jana Machalická on The Last Days. The Eve. (“Marthaler in the Parliament”). The following section is also about festivals: the Poznań festival is described by Vladimír Mikulka (“Of Men and Machines” – productions by Romeo Castellucci, Marta Górnicka and Geumhyong Jeong) and Táňa Švehlová (“Needcompany: The Story Never Ends”). Jana Návratová (“Bombs, Somewhat Unexploded”) writes about the productions 32 rue Vandenbranden by the Peeping Tom ensemble and DASH by Akram Khan, both to be seen at this year’s Tanec Praha festival. The “Great Drama” section consists of Angela Marley’s essay “Seamless Pipes” and Aleks Sierz’s article “Caryl Churchill” which introduces her play Love and Information. The “Comedy Mix” this time introduces a comic Louis C. K. (including a sample of his show Oh My God) and Lucie Lomová’s comic strip Shooting Star continues with its eleventh instalment The Hostage.
Buranteatr was found in Brno by a group of JAMU graduates as a generational theatre Gradually it worked its way to becoming a well-known ensemble with a traditional approach to the poetics of drama theatre – a relatively rare attitude among young Czech theatres. Buranteatr sees its model in the Anglo-Saxon approach to the theatre, preferring to stage regular plays, respecting the ideas of the playwright and avoiding so-called “director’s” theatre. Besides the literary manager Jan Šotkovský and art director Zetel, the distinct personality of the company is primarily the actor Michal Isteník, recognised as the “Talent of the Year” in the 2012 Alfréd Radok Awards. The essay is dedicated to five key productions of the 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons. Amazonia (Michał Walczak) and Exiles (James Joyce) were both directed by Mikoláš Tyc – who became the new artistic director of Buranteatr in autumn 2013 – as intentionally straightforward actors’ theatre. In the comically inclined Amazonia the key question is how far theatre people and more generally artists themselves can keep their independence and common sense when they are lured by financially favourable engagements in artistically negligible commercial productions on the one hand and by pretentious but barren “alternative” projects on the other. Exiles is a chamber production stripped of its original Ibsenian rhetoric and focused on the question of the limits of human freedom and the need to respect certain stereotypes in mutual relationships. On the other hand, Mamet’s November is presented as intensively comic actors’ theatre, interpreted as an almost Feydeauan farce from the highest level of world politics. The Lord of the Camellias is a playful variation on the famous novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The anguished lover Duval becomes a central character and stage directors ironically balance Dumas’s romantically melodramatic interpretation against contemporary matter-of-factness and mistrust of spectacular, stirring excitement. The key character is Michal Isteník in the title role. The same applies to Dziady – the most ambitious production by the Buranteatr to date. Zetel and Šotkovský have selected the section of Mickiewicz’s poem that deals with the Dziady feast and they confront the dignity of death in a traditional society and its contemporary banalized guise in a story of a deceased lover Gustav. At the same time the production is conceived as a musical melodrama and events on stage are accompanied by a live twelve-piece orchestra.
The Slovak Russia In a comprehensive study “The White Birch Trees Syndrome” Martina Ulmanová writes about productions of classical works of Russian literature performed in Slovak professional theatres in the 2012/2013 season. She offers descriptions and assessments of thirteen productions by theatres from Prešov to Bratislava, including plays and dramatizations of novels. Of the writers staged, it is Dostoevsky who takes the lead – the author seems to have had his own festival in Slovakia in the last season: The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment or The Eternal Husband – were all performed in Slovak theatres. Pushkin, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Chekhov, Turgenev and Gorky are also among those included. Besides reviewing the separate productions the author looks for links between them and compares their common features – for instance the approach of theatre professionals to adaptations of Dostoevsky’s prose works. However, she is mostly interested in descriptions of how separate production teams worked with our fixed notion of “what is Russian” – she is attentive to props such as icons and tea urns, Russian romantic songs, but also more complex staging methods that describe – sometimes sentimentally, at others with an attempt at detachment or a sneer – “a wide-open Russian soul”. Ulmanová tries to respect both approaches and to assess productions in their aesthetic wholeness, and thus she accepts even productions that have certain affection for “the classic Russian” (Sprušanský’s Vassa, Brutovský’s Profitable Position). However, her highest praise is for a production that refutes and lampoons all Russian clichés: Drábek’s version of The Seagull at the Slovak National Theatre is, according to her, “an intellectually provoking, entertaining and outstandingly moving production supported above all by excellent acting.” Ulmanová sees the reason that this production did not attract audiences, in spite of its exceptional qualities and courageous production as “this production reached a peak in stripping away the Russian varnish of the work. There is no Russian language in it, no Orthodox hymns thunder, there are no icons and no tea urns, no jovially annoying vodka drinkers hold forth about their life wisdom. The production even refrained from drawing on ironical megalomania and certain essential acting of the Russian nature, as was used for instance in Krobot’s otherwise independent dramatization of Dostoevsky’s Idiot in the Astorka theatre of Bratislava: “The more you beat me the better we will know each other – this is a Russian proverb, you know? Let’s see if it holds true…”